And, to this end, let us not aim at common degrees of merit. Can we not

leave, to such as love it, the virtue that glitters for the commendation

of society, and ourselves pierce the deep solitudes of absolute ability

and worth? We easily come up to the standard of goodness in society.

Society’s praise can be cheaply secured, and almost all men are content

with those easy merits; but the instant effect of conversing with God,

will be, to put them away. There are persons who are not actors, not

speakers, but influences; persons too great for fame, for display; who

disdain eloquence; to whom all we call art and artist, seems too nearly

allied to show and by-ends, to the exaggeration of the finite and

selfish, and loss of the universal. The orators, the poets, the

commanders encroach on us only as fair women do, by our allowance and

homage. Slight them by preoccupation of mind, slight them, as you can

well afford to do, by high and universal aims, and they instantly feel

that you have right, and that it is in lower places that they must

shine. They also feel your right; for they with you are open to the

influx of the all-knowing Spirit, which annihilates before its broad

noon the little shades and gradations of intelligence in the

compositions we call wiser and wisest.

In such high communion, let us study the grand strokes of rectitude: a

bold benevolence, an independence of friends, so that not the unjust

wishes of those who love us, shall impair our freedom, but we shall

resist for truth’s sake the freest flow of kindness, and appeal to

sympathies far in advance; and,--what is the highest form in which we

know this beautiful element,--a certain solidity of merit, that has

nothing to do with opinion, and which is so essentially and manifestly

virtue, that it is taken for granted, that the right, the brave, the

generous step will be taken by it, and nobody thinks of commending it.

You would compliment a coxcomb doing a good act, but you would not

praise an angel. The silence that accepts merit as the most natural

thing in the world, is the highest applause. Such souls, when they

appear, are the Imperial Guard of Virtue, the perpetual reserve, the

dictators of fortune. One needs not praise their courage,--they are the

heart and soul of nature. O my friends, there are resources in us on

which we have not drawn. There are men who rise refreshed on hearing a

threat; men to whom a crisis which intimidates and paralyzes the

majority,--demanding not the faculties of prudence and thrift, but

comprehension, immovableness, the readiness of sacrifice,--comes

graceful and beloved as a bride. Napoleon said to Massena, that he was

not himself until the battle began to go against him; then, when the

dead began to fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of combination,

and he put on terror and victory as a robe. So it is in rugged crises,

in unweariable endurance, and in aims which put sympathy out of

question, that the angel is shown. But these are heights that we can

scarce remember and look up to, without contrition and shame. Let us

thank God that such things exist.

And now let us do what we can to rekindle the smouldering, nigh quenched

fire on the altar. The evils of the church that now is are manifest. The

question returns, What shall we do? I confess, all attempts to project

and establish a Cultus with new rites and forms, seem to me vain. Faith

makes us, and not we it, and faith makes its own forms. All attempts to

contrive a system are as cold as the new worship introduced by the

French to the goddess of Reason,--to-day, pasteboard and fillagree, and

ending to-morrow in madness and murder. Rather let the breath of new

life be breathed by you through the forms already existing. For, if once

you are alive, you shall find they shall become plastic and new. The

remedy to their deformity is, first, soul, and second, soul, and

evermore, soul. A whole popedom of forms, one pulsation of virtue can

uplift and vivify. Two inestimable advantages Christianity has given us;

first; the Sabbath, the jubilee of the whole world; whose light dawns

welcome alike into the closet of the philosopher, into the garret of

toil, and into prison-cells, and everywhere suggests, even to the vile,

the dignity of spiritual being. Let us stand forevermore, a temple,

which new love, new faith, new sight shall restore to more than its

first splendor to mankind. And secondly, the institution of

preaching,--the speech of man to men,--essentially the most flexible of

all organs, of all forms. What hinders that now, everywhere, in pulpits,

in lecture-rooms, in houses, in fields, wherever the invitation of men

or your own occasions lead you, you speak the very truth, as your life

and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men

with new hope and new revelation?

I look for the hour when that supreme Beauty, which ravished the souls

of those eastern men, and chiefly of those Hebrews, and through their

lips spoke oracles to all time, shall speak in the West also. The Hebrew

and Greek Scriptures contain immortal sentences, that have been bread of

life to millions. But they have no epical integrity; are fragmentary;

are not shown in their order to the intellect. I look for the new

Teacher, that shall follow so far those shining laws, that he shall see

them come full circle; shall see their rounding complete grace; shall

see the world to be the mirror of the soul; shall see the identity of

the law of gravitation with purity of heart; and shall show that the

Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy.

LITERARY ETHICS.

AN ORATION DELIVERED BEFORE THE LITERARY SOCIETIES OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE,

JULY 24, 1838.

ORATION.

GENTLEMEN,

The invitation to address you this day, with which you have honored me,

was a call so welcome, that I made haste to obey it. A summons to

celebrate with scholars a literary festival, is so alluring to me, as to

overcome the doubts I might well entertain of my ability to bring you

any thought worthy of your attention. I have reached the middle age of

man; yet I believe I am not less glad or sanguine at the meeting of

scholars, than when, a boy, I first saw the graduates of my own College

assembled at their anniversary. Neither years nor books have yet availed

to extirpate a prejudice then rooted in me, that a scholar is the

favorite of Heaven and earth, the excellency of his country, the

happiest of men. His duties lead him directly into the holy ground

where other men’s aspirations only point. His successes are occasions of

the purest joy to all men. Eyes is he to the blind; feet is he to the

lame. His failures, if he is worthy, are inlets to higher advantages.

And because the scholar, by every thought he thinks, extends his

dominion into the general mind of men, he is not one, but many. The few

scholars in each country, whose genius I know, seem to me not

individuals, but societies; and, when events occur of great import, I

count over these representatives of opinion, whom they will affect, as

if I were counting nations. And, even if his results were

incommunicable; if they abode in his own spirit; the intellect hath

somewhat so sacred in its possessions, that the fact of his existence

and pursuits would be a happy omen.

Meantime I know that a very different estimate of the scholar’s

profession prevails in this country, and the importunity, with which

society presses its claim upon young men, tends to pervert the views of

the youth in respect to the culture of the intellect. Hence the

historical failure, on which Europe and America have so freely

commented. This country has not fulfilled what seemed the reasonable

expectation of mankind. Men looked, when all feudal straps and bandages

were snapped asunder, that nature, too long the mother of dwarfs,

should reimburse itself by a brood of Titans, who should laugh and leap

in the continent, and run up the mountains of the West with the errand

of genius and of love. But the mark of American merit in painting, in

sculpture, in poetry, in fiction, in eloquence, seems to be a certain

grace without grandeur, and itself not new but derivative; a vase of

fair outline, but empty,--which whoso sees, may fill with what wit and

character is in him, but which does not, like the charged cloud,

overflow with terrible beauty, and emit lightnings on all beholders.

I will not lose myself in the desultory questions, what are the

limitations, and what the causes of the fact. It suffices me to say, in

general, that the diffidence of mankind in the soul has crept over the

American mind; that men here, as elsewhere, are indisposed to

innovation, and prefer any antiquity, any usage, any livery productive

of ease or profit, to the unproductive service of thought.

Yet, in every sane hour, the service of thought appears reasonable, the

despotism of the senses insane. The scholar may lose himself in schools,

in words, and become a pedant; but when he comprehends his duties, he

above all men is a realist, and converses with things. For, the scholar

is the student of the world, and of what worth the world is, and with

what emphasis it accosts the soul of man, such is the worth, such the

call of the scholar.

The want of the times, and the propriety of this anniversary, concur to

draw attention to the doctrine of Literary Ethics. What I have to say on

that doctrine distributes itself under the topics of the resources, the

subject, and the discipline of the scholar.

I. The resources of the scholar are proportioned to his confidence in

the attributes of the Intellect. The resources of the scholar are

coextensive with nature and truth, yet can never be his, unless claimed

by him with an equal greatness of mind. He cannot know them until he has

beheld with awe the infinitude and impersonality of the intellectual

power. When he has seen, that it is not his, nor any man’s, but that it

is the soul which made the world, and that it is all accessible to him,

he will know that he, as its minister, may rightfully hold all things

subordinate and answerable to it. A divine pilgrim in nature, all things

attend his steps. Over him stream the flying constellations; over him

streams Time, as they, scarcely divided into months and years. He

inhales the year as a vapor: its fragrant midsummer breath, its

sparkling January heaven. And so pass into his mind, in bright

transfiguration, the grand events of history, to take a new order and

scale from him. He is the world; and the epochs and heroes of chronology

are pictorial images, in which his thoughts are told. There is no event

but sprung somewhere from the soul of man; and therefore there is none

but the soul of man can interpret. Every presentiment of the mind is

executed somewhere in a gigantic fact. What else is Greece, Rome,

England, France, St. Helena? What else are churches, literatures, and

empires? The new man must feel that he is new, and has not come into the

world mortgaged to the opinions and usages of Europe, and Asia, and

Egypt. The sense of spiritual independence is like the lovely varnish of

the dew, whereby the old, hard, peaked earth, and its old self-same

productions, are made new every morning, and shining with the last touch

of the artist’s hand. A false humility, a complaisance to reigning

schools, or to the wisdom of antiquity, must not defraud me of supreme

possession of this hour. If any person have less love of liberty, and

less jealousy to guard his integrity, shall he therefore dictate to you

and me? Say to such doctors, We are thankful to you, as we are to

history, to the pyramids, and the authors; but now our day is come; we

have been born out of the eternal silence; and now will we live,--live

for ourselves,--and not as the pall-bearers of a funeral, but as the

upholders and creators of our age; and neither Greece nor Rome, nor the

three Unities of Aristotle, nor the three Kings of Cologne, nor the

College of the Sorbonne, nor the Edinburgh Review, is to command any

longer. Now that we are here, we will put our own interpretation on

things, and our own things for interpretation. Please himself with

complaisance who will,--for me, things must take my scale, not I theirs.

I will say with the warlike king, “God gave me this crown, and the whole

world shall not take it away.”

The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my self-trust,

by demonstrating what man can be and do. This is the moral of the

Plutarchs, the Cudworths, the Tennemanns, who give us the story of men

or of opinions. Any history of philosophy fortifies my faith, by showing

me, that what high dogmas I had supposed were the rare and late fruit of

a cumulative culture, and only now possible to some recent Kant or

Fichte,--were the prompt improvisations of the earliest inquirers; of

Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Xenophanes. In view of these students, the

soul seems to whisper, ‘There is a better way than this indolent

learning of another. Leave me alone; do not teach me out of Leibnitz or

Schelling, and I shall find it all out myself.’

Still more do we owe to biography the fortification of our hope. If you

would know the power of character, see how much you would impoverish the

world, if you could take clean out of history the lives of Milton,

Shakspeare, and Plato,--these three, and cause them not to be. See you

not, how much less the power of man would be? I console myself in the

poverty of my thoughts; in the paucity of great men, in the malignity

and dulness of the nations, by falling back on these sublime

recollections, and seeing what the prolific soul could beget on actual

nature;--seeing that Plato was, and Shakspeare, and Milton,--three

irrefragable facts. Then I dare; I also will essay to be. The humblest,

the most hopeless, in view of these radiant facts, may now theorize and

hope. In spite of all the rueful abortions that squeak and gibber in the

street, in spite of slumber and guilt, in spite of the army, the

bar-room, and the jail, _have been_ these glorious manifestations of the

mind; and I will thank my great brothers so truly for the admonition of

their being, as to endeavor also to be just and brave, to aspire and to

speak. Plotinus too, and Spinoza, and the immortal bards of

philosophy,--that which they have written out with patient courage,

makes me bold. No more will I dismiss, with haste, the visions which

flash and sparkle across my sky; but observe them, approach them,

domesticate them, brood on them, and draw out of the past, genuine life

for the present hour.

To feel the full value of these lives, as occasions of hope and

provocation, you must come to know, that each admirable genius is but a

successful diver in that sea whose floor of pearls is all your own. The

impoverishing philosophy of ages has laid stress on the distinctions of

the individual, and not on the universal attributes of man. The youth,

intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only

a projection of his own soul, which he admires. In solitude, in a remote

village, the ardent youth loiters and mourns. With inflamed eye, in this

sleeping wilderness, he has read the story of the Emperor Charles the

Fifth, until his fancy has brought home to the surrounding woods, the

faint roar of cannonades in the Milanese, and marches in Germany. He is

curious concerning that man’s day. What filled it? the crowded orders,

the stern decisions, the foreign despatches, the Castilian etiquette?

The soul answers--Behold his day here! In the sighing of these woods, in

the quiet of these gray fields, in the cool breeze that sings out of

these northern mountains; in the workmen, the boys, the maidens, you

meet,--in the hopes of the morning, the ennui of noon, and sauntering of

the afternoon; in the disquieting comparisons; in the regrets at want of

vigor; in the great idea, and the puny execution;--behold Charles the

Fifth’s day; another, yet the same; behold Chatham’s, Hampden’s,

Bayard’s, Alfred’s, Scipio’s, Pericles’s day,--day of all that are born

of women. The difference of circumstance is merely costume. I am tasting

the self-same life,--its sweetness, its greatness, its pain, which I so

admire in other men. Do not foolishly ask of the inscrutable,

obliterated past, what it cannot tell,--the details of that nature, of

that day, called Byron, or Burke;--but ask it of the enveloping Now; the

more quaintly you inspect its evanescent beauties, its wonderful

details, its spiritual causes, its astounding whole,--so much the more

you master the biography of this hero, and that, and every hero. Be lord

of a day, through wisdom and justice, and you can put up your history

books.

An intimation of these broad rights is familiar in the sense of injury

which men feel in the assumption of any man to limit their possible

progress. We resent all criticism, which denies us any thing that lies

in our line of advance. Say to the man of letters, that he cannot paint

a Transfiguration, or build a steamboat, or be a grand-marshal,--and he

will not seem to himself depreciated. But deny to him any quality of

literary or metaphysical power, and he is piqued. Concede to him genius,

which is a sort of Stoical _plenum_ annulling the comparative, and he is

content; but concede him talents never so rare, denying him genius, and

he is aggrieved. What does this mean? Why simply, that the soul has

assurance, by instincts and presentiments, of _all_ power in the

direction of its ray, as well as of the special skills it has already

acquired.

In order to a knowledge of the resources of the scholar, we must not

rest in the use of slender accomplishments,--of faculties to do this and

that other feat with words; but we must pay our vows to the highest

power, and pass, if it be possible, by assiduous love and watching, into

the visions of absolute truth. The growth of the intellect is strictly

analogous in all individuals. It is larger reception. Able men, in

general, have good dispositions, and a respect for justice; because an

able man is nothing else than a good, free, vascular organization,

whereinto the universal spirit freely flows; so that his fund of justice

is not only vast, but infinite. All men, in the abstract, are just and

good; what hinders them, in the particular, is, the momentary

predominance of the finite and individual over the general truth. The

condition of our incarnation in a private self, seems to be, a perpetual

tendency to prefer the private law, to obey the private impulse, to the

exclusion of the law of universal being. The hero is great by means of

the predominance of the universal nature; he has only to open his mouth,

and it speaks; he has only to be forced to act, and it acts. All men

catch the word, or embrace the deed, with the heart, for it is verily

theirs as much as his; but in them this disease of an excess of

organization cheats them of equal issues. Nothing is more simple than

greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great. The vision of genius

comes by renouncing the too officious activity of the understanding, and

giving leave and amplest privilege to the spontaneous sentiment. Out of

this must all that is alive and genial in thought go. Men grind and

grind in the mill of a truism, and nothing comes out but what was put

in. But the moment they desert the tradition for a spontaneous thought,

then poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning, anecdote, all flock to their

aid. Observe the phenomenon of extempore debate. A man of cultivated

mind, but reserved habits, sitting silent, admires the miracle of free,

impassioned, picturesque speech, in the man addressing an assembly;--a

state of being and power, how unlike his own! Presently his own emotion

rises to his lips, and overflows in speech. He must also rise and say

somewhat. Once embarked, once having overcome the novelty of the

situation, he finds it just as easy and natural to speak,--to speak with

thoughts, with pictures, with rhythmical balance of sentences,--as it

was to sit silent; for, it needs not to do, but to suffer; he only

adjusts himself to the free spirit which gladly utters itself through

him; and motion is as easy as rest.

II. I pass now to consider the task offered to the intellect of this

country. The view I have taken of the resources of the scholar,

presupposes a subject as broad. We do not seem to have imagined its

riches. We have not heeded the invitation it holds out. To be as good a

scholar as Englishmen are; to have as much learning as our

contemporaries; to have written a book that is read; satisfies us. We

assume, that all thought is already long ago adequately set down in

books,--all imaginations in poems; and what we say, we only throw in as

confirmatory of this supposed complete body of literature. A very

shallow assumption. Say rather, all literature is yet to be written.

Poetry has scarce chanted its first song. The perpetual admonition of

nature to us, is, ‘The world is new, untried. Do not believe the past. I

give you the universe a virgin to-day.’

By Latin and English poetry, we were born and bred in an oratorio of

praises of nature,--flowers, birds, mountains, sun, and moon;--yet the

naturalist of this hour finds that he knows nothing, by all their poems,

of any of these fine things; that he has conversed with the mere surface

and show of them all; and of their essence, or of their history, knowing

nothing. Further inquiry will discover that nobody,--that not these

chanting poets themselves, knew any thing sincere of these handsome

natures they so commended; that they contented themselves with the

passing chirp of a bird, that they saw one or two mornings, and

listlessly looked at sunsets, and repeated idly these few glimpses in

their song. But go into the forest, you shall find all new and

undescribed. The hawking of the wild geese flying by night; the thin

note of the companionable titmouse, in the winter day; the fall of

swarms of flies, in autumn, from combats high in the air, pattering down

on the leaves like rain; the angry hiss of the woodbirds; the pine

throwing out its pollen for the benefit of the next century; the

turpentine exuding from the tree;--and, indeed, any vegetation; any

animation; any and all, are alike unattempted. The man who stands on the

seashore, or who rambles in the woods, seems to be the first man that

ever stood on the shore, or entered a grove, his sensations and his

world are so novel and strange. Whilst I read the poets, I think that

nothing new can be said about morning and evening. But when I see the

daybreak, I am not reminded of these Homeric, or Shakspearian, or

Miltonic, or Chaucerian pictures. No; but I feel perhaps the pain of an

alien world; a world not yet subdued by the thought; or, I am cheered by

the moist, warm, glittering, budding, melodious hour, that takes down

the narrow walls of my soul, and extends its life and pulsation to the

very horizon. _That_ is morning, to cease for a bright hour to be a

prisoner of this sickly body, and to become as large as nature.

The noonday darkness of the American forest, the deep, echoing,

aboriginal woods, where the living columns of the oak and fir tower up

from the ruins of the trees of the last millennium; where, from year to

year, the eagle and the crow see no intruder; the pines, bearded with

savage moss, yet touched with grace by the violets at their feet; the

broad, cold lowland, which forms its coat of vapor with the stillness of

subterranean crystallization; and where the traveller, amid the

repulsive plants that are native in the swamp, thinks with pleasing

terror of the distant town; this beauty,--haggard and desert beauty,

which the sun and the moon, the snow and the rain, repaint and vary, has

never been recorded by art, yet is not indifferent to any passenger. All

men are poets at heart. They serve nature for bread, but her loveliness

overcomes them sometimes. What mean these journeys to Niagara; these

pilgrims to the White Hills? Men believe in the adaptations of utility,

always: in the mountains, they may believe in the adaptations of the

eye. Undoubtedly, the changes of geology have a relation to the

prosperous sprouting of the corn and peas in my kitchen garden; but not

less is there a relation of beauty between my soul and the dim crags of

Agiocochook up there in the clouds. Every man, when this is told,

hearkens with joy, and yet his own conversation with nature is still

unsung.

Is it otherwise with civil history? Is it not the lesson of our

experience that every man, were life long enough, would write history

for himself? What else do these volumes of extracts and manuscript

commentaries, that every scholar writes, indicate? Greek history is one

thing to me; another to you. Since the birth of Niebuhr and Wolf, Roman

and Greek History have been written anew. Since Carlyle wrote French

History, we see that no history, that we have, is safe, but a new

classifier shall give it new and more philosophical arrangement.

Thucydides, Livy, have only provided materials. The moment a man of

genius pronounces the name of the Pelasgi, of Athens, of the Etrurian,

of the Roman people, we see their state under a new aspect. As in poetry

and history, so in the other departments. There are few masters or none.

Religion is yet to be settled on its fast foundations in the breast of

man; and politics, and philosophy, and letters, and art. As yet we have

nothing but tendency and indication.

This starting, this warping of the best literary works from the adamant

of nature, is especially observable in philosophy. Let it take what tone

of pretension it will, to this complexion must it come, at last. Take,

for example, the French Eclecticism, which Cousin esteems so

conclusive; there is an optical illusion in it. It avows great

pretensions. It looks as if they had all truth, in taking all the

systems, and had nothing to do, but to sift and wash and strain, and the

gold and diamonds would remain in the last colander. But, Truth is such

a flyaway, such a slyboots, so untransportable and unbarrelable a

commodity, that it is as bad to catch as light. Shut the shutters never

so quick, to keep all the light in, it is all in vain; it is gone before

you can cry, Hold. And so it happens with our philosophy. Translate,

collate, distil all the systems, it steads you nothing; for truth will

not be compelled, in any mechanical manner. But the first observation

you make, in the sincere act of your nature, though on the veriest

trifle, may open a new view of nature and of man, that, like a

menstruum, shall dissolve all theories in it; shall take up Greece,

Rome, Stoicism, Eclecticism, and what not, as mere data and food for

analysis, and dispose of your world-containing system, as a very little

unit. A profound thought, anywhere, classifies all things: a profound

thought will lift Olympus. The book of philosophy is only a fact, and no

more inspiring fact than another, and no less; but a wise man will never

esteem it anything final and transcending. Go and talk with a man of

genius, and the first word he utters, sets all your so-called knowledge

afloat and at large. Then Plato, Bacon, Kant, and the Eclectic Cousin,

condescend instantly to be men and mere facts.

I by no means aim, in these remarks, to disparage the merit of these or

of any existing compositions; I only say that any particular portraiture

does not in any manner exclude or forestall a new attempt, but, when

considered by the soul, warps and shrinks away. The inundation of the

spirit sweeps away before it all our little architecture of wit and

memory, as straws and straw-huts before the torrent. Works of the

intellect are great only by comparison with each other; Ivanhoe and

Waverley compared with Castle Radcliffe and the Porter novels; but

nothing is great,--not mighty Homer and Milton,--beside the infinite

Reason. It carries them away as a flood. They are as a sleep.

Thus is justice done to each generation and individual,--wisdom teaching

man that he shall not hate, or fear, or mimic his ancestors; that he

shall not bewail himself, as if the world was old, and thought was

spent, and he was born into the dotage of things; for, by virtue of the

Deity, thought renews itself inexhaustibly every day, and the thing

whereon it shines, though it were dust and sand, is a new subject with

countless relations.

III. Having thus spoken of the resources and the subject of the scholar,

out of the same faith proceeds also the rule of his ambition and life.

Let him know that the world is his, but he must possess it by putting

himself into harmony with the constitution of things. He must be a

solitary, laborious, modest, and charitable soul.

He must embrace solitude as a bride. He must have his glees and his

glooms alone. His own estimate must be measure enough, his own praise

reward enough for him. And why must the student be solitary and silent?

That he may become acquainted with his thoughts. If he pines in a lonely

place, hankering for the crowd, for display, he is not in the lonely

place; his heart is in the market; he does not see; he does not hear; he

does not think. But go cherish your soul; expel companions; set your

habits to a life of solitude; then, will the faculties rise fair and

full within, like forest trees and field flowers; you will have results,

which, when you meet your fellow-men, you can communicate, and they will

gladly receive. Do not go into solitude only that you may presently come

into public. Such solitude denies itself; is public and stale. The

public can get public experience, but they wish the scholar to replace

to them those private, sincere, divine experiences, of which they have

been defrauded by dwelling in the street. It is the noble, manlike, just

thought, which is the superiority demanded of you, and not crowds but

solitude confers this elevation. Not insulation of place, but

independence of spirit is essential, and it is only as the garden, the

cottage, the forest, and the rock, are a sort of mechanical aids to

this, that they are of value. Think alone, and all places are friendly

and sacred. The poets who have lived in cities have been hermits still.

Inspiration makes solitude anywhere. Pindar, Raphael, Angelo, Dryden, De

Staël, dwell in crowds, it may be, but the instant thought comes, the

crowd grows dim to their eye; their eye fixes on the horizon,--on vacant

space; they forget the bystanders; they spurn personal relations; they

deal with abstractions, with verities, with ideas. They are alone with

the mind.

Of course, I would not have any superstition about solitude. Let the

youth study the uses of solitude and of society. Let him use both, not

serve either. The reason why an ingenious soul shuns society, is to the

end of finding society. It repudiates the false, out of love of the

true. You can very soon learn all that society can teach you for one

while. Its foolish routine, an indefinite multiplication of balls,

concerts, rides, theatres, can teach you no more than a few can. Then

accept the hint of shame, of spiritual emptiness and waste, which true

nature gives you, and retire, and hide; lock the door; shut the

shutters; then welcome falls the imprisoning rain,--dear hermitage of

nature. Re-collect the spirits. Have solitary prayer and praise. Digest

and correct the past experience; and blend it with the new and divine

life.

You will pardon me, Gentlemen, if I say, I think that we have need of a

more rigorous scholastic rule; such an asceticism, I mean, as only the

hardihood and devotion of the scholar himself can enforce. We live in

the sun and on the surface,--a thin, plausible, superficial existence,

and talk of muse and prophet, of art and creation. But out of our

shallow and frivolous way of life, how can greatness ever grow? Come

now, let us go and be dumb. Let us sit with our hands on our mouths, a

long, austere, Pythagorean lustrum. Let us live in corners, and do

chores, and suffer, and weep, and drudge, with eyes and hearts that love

the Lord. Silence, seclusion, austerity, may pierce deep into the

grandeur and secret of our being, and so diving, bring up out of secular

darkness, the sublimities of the moral constitution. How mean to go

blazing, a gaudy butterfly, in fashionable or political saloons, the

fool of society, the fool of notoriety, a topic for newspapers, a piece

of the street, and forfeiting the real prerogative of the russet coat,

the privacy, and the true and warm heart of the citizen!

Fatal to the man of letters, fatal to man, is the lust of display, the

seeming that unmakes our being. A mistake of the main end to which they

labor, is incident to literary men, who, dealing with the organ of

language,--the subtlest, strongest, and longest-lived of man’s

creations, and only fitly used as the weapon of thought and of

justice,--learn to enjoy the pride of playing with this splendid engine,

but rob it of its almightiness by failing to work with it. Extricating

themselves from the tasks of the world, the world revenges itself by

exposing, at every turn, the folly of these incomplete, pedantic,

useless, ghostly creatures. The scholar will feel, that the richest

romance,--the noblest fiction that was ever woven,--the heart and soul

of beauty,--lies enclosed in human life. Itself of surpassing value, it

is also the richest material for his creations. How shall he know its

secrets of tenderness, of terror, of will, and of fate? How can he catch

and keep the strain of upper music that peals from it? Its laws are

concealed under the details of daily action. All action is an experiment

upon them. He must bear his share of the common load. He must work with

men in houses, and not with their names in books. His needs, appetites,

talents, affections, accomplishments, are keys that open to him the

beautiful museum of human life. Why should he read it as an Arabian

tale, and not know, in his own beating bosom, its sweet and smart? Out

of love and hatred, out of earnings, and borrowings, and lendings, and

losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of

travelling, and voting, and watching, and caring; out of disgrace and

contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws. Let him

not slur his lesson; let him learn it by heart. Let him endeavor

exactly, bravely, and cheerfully, to solve the problem of that life

which is set before _him_. And this, by punctual action, and not by

promises or dreams. Believing, as in God, in the presence and favor of

the grandest influences, let him deserve that favor, and learn how to

receive and use it, by fidelity also to the lower observances.

This lesson is taught with emphasis in the life of the great actor of

this age, and affords the explanation of his success. Bonaparte

represents truly a great recent revolution, which we in this country,

please God, shall carry to its farthest consummation. Not the least

instructive passage in modern history, seems to me a trait of Napoleon,

exhibited to the English when he became their prisoner. On coming on

board the Bellerophon, a file of English soldiers drawn up on deck, gave

him a military salute. Napoleon observed, that their manner of handling

their arms differed from the French exercise, and, putting aside the

guns of those nearest him, walked up to a soldier, took his gun, and

himself went through the motion in the French mode. The English officers

and men looked on with astonishment, and inquired if such familiarity

was usual with the Emperor.

In this instance, as always, that man, with whatever defects or vices,

represented performance in lieu of pretension. Feudalism and Orientalism

had long enough thought it majestic to do nothing; the modern majesty

consists in work. He belonged to a class fast growing in the world, who

think, that what a man can do is his greatest ornament, and that he

always consults his dignity by doing it. He was not a believer in luck;

he had a faith, like sight, in the application of means to ends. Means

to ends, is the motto of all his behavior. He believed that the great

captains of antiquity performed their exploits only by correct

combinations, and by justly comparing the relation between means and

consequences; efforts and obstacles. The vulgar call good fortune that

which really is produced by the calculations of genius. But Napoleon,

thus faithful to facts, had also this crowning merit; that, whilst he

believed in number and weight, and omitted no part of prudence, he

believed also in the freedom and quite incalculable force of the soul. A

man of infinite caution, he neglected never the least particular of

preparation, of patient adaptation; yet nevertheless he had a sublime

confidence, as in his all, in the sallies of the courage, and the faith

in his destiny, which, at the right moment, repaired all losses, and

demolished cavalry, infantry, king, and kaisar, as with irresistible

thunderbolts. As they say the bough of the tree has the character of the

leaf, and the whole tree of the bough, so, it is curious to remark,

Bonaparte’s army partook of this double strength of the captain; for,

whilst strictly supplied in all its appointments, and everything

expected from the valor and discipline of every platoon, in flank and

centre, yet always remained his total trust in the prodigious

revolutions of fortune, which his reserved Imperial Guard were capable

of working, if, in all else, the day was lost. Here he was sublime. He

no longer calculated the chance of the cannon ball. He was faithful to

tactics to the uttermost,--and when all tactics had come to an end,

then, he dilated, and availed himself of the mighty saltations of the

most formidable soldiers in nature.

Let the scholar appreciate this combination of gifts, which, applied to

better purpose, make true wisdom. He is a revealer of things. Let him

first learn the things. Let him not, too eager to grasp some badge of

reward, omit the work to be done. Let him know, that, though the success

of the market is in the reward, true success is the doing; that, in the

private obedience to his mind; in the sedulous inquiry, day after day,

year after year, to know how the thing stands; in the use of all means,

and most in the reverence of the humble commerce and humble needs of

life,--to hearken what _they_ say, and so, by mutual reaction of thought

and life, to make thought solid, and life wise; and in a contempt for

the gabble of to-day’s opinions, the secret of the world is to be

learned, and the skill truly to unfold it is acquired. Or, rather, is it

not, that, by this discipline, the usurpation of the senses is

overcome, and the lower faculties of man are subdued to docility;

through which, as an unobstructed channel, the soul now easily and

gladly flows?

The good scholar will not refuse to bear the yoke in his youth; to know,

if he can, the uttermost secret of toil and endurance; to make his own

hands acquainted with the soil by which he is fed, and the sweat that

goes before comfort and luxury. Let him pay his tithe, and serve the

world as a true and noble man; never forgetting to worship the immortal

divinities, who whisper to the poet, and make him the utterer of

melodies that pierce the ear of eternal time. If he have this twofold

goodness,--the drill and the inspiration,--then he has health; then he

is a whole, and not a fragment; and the perfection of his endowment will

appear in his compositions. Indeed, this twofold merit characterizes

ever the productions of great masters. The man of genius should occupy

the whole space between God or pure mind, and the multitude of

uneducated men. He must draw from the infinite Reason, on one side; and

he must penetrate into the heart and sense of the crowd, on the other.

From one, he must draw his strength; to the other he must owe his aim.

The one yokes him to the real; the other, to the apparent. At one pole,

is Reason; at the other, Common Sense. If he be defective at either

extreme of the scale, his philosophy will seem low and utilitarian; or

it will appear too vague and indefinite for the uses of life.

The student, as we all along insist, is great only by being passive to

the superincumbent spirit. Let this faith, then, dictate all his action.

Snares and bribes abound to mislead him; let him be true nevertheless.

His success has its perils too. There is somewhat inconvenient and

injurious in his position. They whom his thoughts have entertained or

inflamed, seek him before yet they have learned the hard conditions of

thought. They seek him, that he may turn his lamp on the dark riddles

whose solution they think is inscribed on the walls of their being. They

find that he is a poor, ignorant man, in a white-seamed, rusty coat,

like themselves, no wise emitting a continuous stream of light, but now

and then a jet of luminous thought, followed by total darkness;

moreover, that he cannot make of his infrequent illumination a portable

taper to carry whither he would, and explain now this dark riddle, now

that. Sorrow ensues. The scholar regrets to damp the hope of ingenuous

boys; and the youth has lost a star out of his new flaming firmament.

Hence the temptation to the scholar to mystify; to hear the question;

to sit upon it; to make an answer of words, in lack of the oracle of

things. Not the less let him be cold and true, and wait in patience,

knowing that truth can make even silence eloquent and memorable. Truth

shall be policy enough for him. Let him open his breast to all honest

inquiry, and be an artist superior to tricks of art. Show frankly as a

saint would do, your experience, methods, tools, and means. Welcome all

comers to the freest use of the same. And out of this superior frankness

and charity, you shall learn higher secrets of your nature, which gods

will bend and aid you to communicate.

If, with a high trust, he can thus submit himself, he will find that

ample returns are poured into his bosom, out of what seemed hours of

obstruction and loss. Let him not grieve too much on account of unfit

associates. When he sees how much thought he owes to the disagreeable

antagonism of various persons who pass and cross him, he can easily

think that in a society of perfect sympathy, no word, no act, no record,

would be. He will learn, that it is not much matter what he reads, what

he does. Be a scholar, and he shall have the scholar’s part of every

thing. As, in the counting-room, the merchant cares little whether the

cargo be hides or barilla; the transaction, a letter of credit or a

transfer of stocks; be it what it may, his commission comes gently out

of it; so you shall get your lesson out of the hour, and the object,

whether it be a concentrated or a wasteful employment, even in reading a

dull book, or working off a stint of mechanical day labor, which your

necessities or the necessities of others impose.

* * * * *

Gentlemen, I have ventured to offer you these considerations upon the

scholar’s place, and hope, because I thought, that, standing, as many of

you now do, on the threshold of this College, girt and ready to go and

assume tasks, public and private, in your country, you would not be

sorry to be admonished of those primary duties of the intellect, whereof

you will seldom hear from the lips of your new companions. You will hear

every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear, that the first

duty is to get land and money, place and name. ‘What is this Truth you

seek? what is this Beauty?’ men will ask, with derision. If,

nevertheless, God have called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be

bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say, ‘As others do, so will I: I

renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good of

the land, and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more

convenient season;’--then dies the man in you; then once more perish the

buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a

thousand thousand men. The hour of that choice is the crisis of your

history; and see that you hold yourself fast by the intellect. It is

this domineering temper of the sensual world, that creates the extreme

need of the priests of science; and it is the office and right of the

intellect to make and not take its estimate. Bend to the persuasion

which is flowing to you from every object in nature, to be its tongue to

the heart of man, and to show the besotted world how passing fair is

wisdom. Forewarned that the vice of the times and the country is an

excessive pretension, let us seek the shade, and find wisdom in neglect.

Be content with a little light, so it be your own. Explore, and explore.

Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual

inquiry. Neither dogmatize, nor accept another’s dogmatism. Why should

you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for

the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its

roof, and bed, and board. Make yourself necessary to the world, and

mankind will give you bread, and if not store of it, yet such as shall

not take away your property in all men’s possessions, in all men’s

affections, in art, in nature, and in hope.

You will not fear, that I am enjoining too stern an asceticism. Ask not,

Of what use is a scholarship that systematically retreats? or, Who is

the better for the philosopher who conceals his accomplishments, and

hides his thoughts from the waiting world? Hides his thoughts! Hide the

sun and moon. Thought is all light, and publishes itself to the

universe. It will speak, though you were dumb, by its own miraculous

organ. It will flow out of your actions, your manners, and your face. It

will bring you friendships. It will impledge you to truth by the love

and expectation of generous minds. By virtue of the laws of that Nature,

which is one and perfect, it shall yield every sincere good that is in

the soul, to the scholar beloved of earth and heaven.

THE METHOD OF NATURE.

AN ORATION DELIVERED BEFORE THE SOCIETY OF THE ADELPHI, IN WATERVILLE

COLLEGE, MAINE, AUGUST 11, 1841.

THE METHOD OF NATURE.

GENTLEMEN,

Let us exchange congratulations on the enjoyments and the promises of

this literary anniversary. The land we live in has no interest so dear,

if it knew its want, as the fit consecration of days of reason and

thought. Where there is no vision, the people perish. The scholars are

the priests of that thought which establishes the foundations of the

earth. No matter what is their special work or profession, they stand

for the spiritual interest of the world, and it is a common calamity if

they neglect their post in a country where the material interest is so

predominant as it is in America. We hear something too much of the

results of machinery, commerce, and the useful arts. We are a puny and a

fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following, are our diseases. The

rapid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the

incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of

all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe

acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the

school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man.

I do not wish to look with sour aspect at the industrious manufacturing

village, or the mart of commerce. I love the music of the water-wheel; I

value the railway; I feel the pride which the sight of a ship inspires;

I look on trade and every mechanical craft as education also. But let me

discriminate what is precious herein. There is in each of these works an

act of invention, an intellectual step, or short series of steps taken;

that act or step is the spiritual act; all the rest is mere repetition

of the same a thousand times. And I will not be deceived into admiring

the routine of handicrafts and mechanics, how splendid soever the

result, any more than I admire the routine of the scholars or clerical

class. That splendid results ensue from the labors of stupid men, is the

fruit of higher laws than their will, and the routine is not to be

praised for it. I would not have the laborer sacrificed to the

result,--I would not have the laborer sacrificed to my convenience and

pride, nor to that of a great class of such as me. Let there be worse

cotton and better men. The weaver should not be bereaved of his

superiority to his work, and his knowledge that the product or the skill

is of no value, except so far as it embodies his spiritual prerogatives.

If I see nothing to admire in the unit, shall I admire a million units?

Men stand in awe of the city, but do not honor any individual citizen;

and are continually yielding to this dazzling result of numbers, that

which they would never yield to the solitary example of any one.

Whilst the multitude of men degrade each other, and give currency to

desponding doctrines, the scholar must be a bringer of hope, and must

reinforce man against himself. I sometimes believe that our literary

anniversaries will presently assume a greater importance, as the eyes of

men open to their capabilities. Here, a new set of distinctions, a new

order of ideas, prevail. Here, we set a bound to the respectability of

wealth, and a bound to the pretensions of the law and the church. The

bigot must cease to be a bigot to-day. Into our charmed circle, power

cannot enter; and the sturdiest defender of existing institutions feels

the terrific inflammability of this air which condenses heat in every

corner that may restore to the elements the fabrics of ages. Nothing

solid is secure; every thing tilts and rocks. Even the scholar is not

safe; he too is searched and revised. Is his learning dead? Is he living

in his memory? The power of mind is not mortification, but life. But

come forth, thou curious child! hither, thou loving, all-hoping poet!

hither, thou tender, doubting heart, who has not yet found any place in

the world’s market fit for thee; any wares which thou couldst buy or

sell,--so large is thy love and ambition,--thine and not theirs is the

hour. Smooth thy brow, and hope and love on, for the kind heaven

justifies thee, and the whole world feels that thou art in the right.

We ought to celebrate this hour by expressions of manly joy. Not thanks,

not prayer seem quite the highest or truest name for our communication

with the infinite,--but glad and conspiring reception,--reception that

becomes giving in its turn, as the receiver is only the All-Giver in

part and in infancy. I cannot,--nor can any man,--speak precisely of

things so sublime, but it seems to me, the wit of man, his strength, his

grace, his tendency, his art, is the grace and the presence of God. It

is beyond explanation. When all is said and done, the rapt saint is

found the only logician. Not exhortation, not argument becomes our

lips, but pæans of joy and praise. But not of adulation; we are too

nearly related in the deep of the mind to that we honor. It is God in us

which checks the language of petition by a grander thought. In the

bottom of the heart, it is said; ‘I am, and by me, O child! this fair

body and world of thine stands and grows. I am; all things are mine: and

all mine are thine.’

The festival of the intellect, and the return to its source, cast a

strong light on the always interesting topics of Man and Nature. We are

forcibly reminded of the old want. There is no man; there hath never

been. The Intellect still asks that a man may be born. The flame of life

flickers feebly in human breasts. We demand of men a richness and

universality we do not find. Great men do not content us. It is their

solitude, not their force, that makes them conspicuous. There is

somewhat indigent and tedious about them. They are poorly tied to one

thought. If they are prophets, they are egotists; if polite and various,

they are shallow. How tardily men arrive at any result! how tardily they

pass from it to another! The crystal sphere of thought is as

concentrical as the geological structure of the globe. As our soils and

rocks lie in strata, concentric strata, so do all men’s thinkings run

laterally, never vertically. Here comes by a great inquisitor with auger

and plumb-line, and will bore an Artesian well through our conventions

and theories, and pierce to the core of things. But as soon as he probes

the crust, behold gimlet, plumb-line, and philosopher take a lateral

direction, in spite of all resistance, as if some strong wind took

everything off its feet, and if you come month after month to see what

progress our reformer has made,--not an inch has he pierced,--you still

find him with new words in the old place, floating about in new parts of

the same old vein or crust. The new book says, ‘I will give you the key

to nature,’ and we expect to go like a thunderbolt to the centre. But

the thunder is a surface phenomenon, makes a skin-deep cut, and so does

the sage. The wedge turns out to be a rocket. Thus a man lasts but a

very little while, for his monomania becomes insupportably tedious in a

few months. It is so with every book and person: and yet--and yet--we do

not take up a new book, or meet a new man, without a pulse-beat of

expectation. And this invincible hope of a more adequate interpreter is

the sure prediction of his advent.

In the absence of man, we turn to nature, which stands next. In the

divine order, intellect is primary; nature, secondary; it is the memory

of the mind. That which once existed in intellect as pure law, has now

taken body as Nature. It existed already in the mind in solution; now,

it has been precipitated, and the bright sediment is the world. We can

never be quite strangers or inferiors in nature. It is flesh of our

flesh, and bone of our bone. But we no longer hold it by the hand; we

have lost our miraculous power; our arm is no more as strong as the

frost; nor our will equivalent to gravity and the elective attractions.

Yet we can use nature as a convenient standard, and the meter of our

rise and fall. It has this advantage as a witness, it cannot be

debauched. When man curses, nature still testifies to truth and love. We

may, therefore, safely study the mind in nature, because we cannot

steadily gaze on it in mind; as we explore the face of the sun in a

pool, when our eyes cannot brook his direct splendors.

It seems to me, therefore, that it were some suitable pæan, if we should

piously celebrate this hour by exploring the _method of nature_. Let us

see _that_, as nearly as we can, and try how far it is transferable to

the literary life. Every earnest glance we give to the realities around

us, with intent to learn, proceeds from a holy impulse, and is really

songs of praise. What difference can it make whether it take the shape

of exhortation, or of passionate exclamation, or of scientific

statement? These are forms merely. Through them we express, at last, the

fact, that God has done thus or thus.

In treating a subject so large, in which we must necessarily appeal to

the intuition, and aim much more to suggest, then to describe, I know it

is not easy to speak with the precision attainable on topics of less

scope. I do not wish in attempting to paint a man, to describe an

air-fed, unimpassioned, impossible ghost. My eyes and ears are revolted

by any neglect of the physical facts, the limitations of man. And yet

one who conceives the true order of nature, and beholds the visible as

proceeding from the invisible, cannot state his thought, without seeming

to those who study the physical laws, to do them some injustice. There

is an intrinsic defect in the organ. Language overstates. Statements of

the infinite, are usually felt to be unjust to the finite, and

blasphemous. Empedocles undoubtedly spoke a truth of thought, when he

said, “I am God;” but the moment it was out of his mouth, it became a

lie to the ear; and the world revenged itself for the seeming arrogance,

by the good story about his shoe. How can I hope for better hap in my

attempts to enunciate spiritual facts? Yet let us hope, that as far as

we receive the truth, so far shall we be felt by every true person to

say what is just.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it? That rushing stream

will not stop to be observed. We can never surprise nature in a corner;

never find the end of a thread; never tell where to set the first stone.

The bird hastens to lay her egg: the egg hastens to be a bird. The

wholeness we admire in the order of the world, is the result of infinite

distribution. Its smoothness is the smoothness of the pitch of the

cataract. Its permanence is a perpetual inchoation. Every natural fact

is an emanation, and that from which it emanates is an emanation also,

and from every emanation is a new emanation. If anything could stand

still, it would be crushed and dissipated by the torrent it resisted,

and if it were a mind, would be crazed; as insane persons are those who

hold fast to one thought, and do not flow with the course of nature. Not

the cause, but an ever novel effect, nature descends always from above.

It is unbroken obedience. The beauty of these fair objects is imported

into them from a metaphysical and eternal spring. In all animal and

vegetable forms, the physiologist concedes that no chemistry, no

mechanics, can account for the facts, but a mysterious principle of life

must be assumed, which not only inhabits the organ, but makes the organ.

How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without place to insert

an atom,--in graceful succession, in equal fulness, in balanced beauty,

the dance of the hours goes forward still. Like an odor of incense, like

a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and boundless. It will

not be dissected, nor unravelled, nor shown. Away profane philosopher!

seekest thou in nature the cause? This refers to that, and that to the

next, and the next to the third, and everything refers. Thou must ask in

another mood, thou must feel it and love it, thou must behold it in a

spirit as grand as that by which it exists, ere thou canst know the law.

Known it will not be, but gladly beloved and enjoyed.

The simultaneous life throughout the whole body, the equal serving of

innumerable ends without the least emphasis or preference to any, but

the steady degradation of each to the success of all, allows the

understanding no place to work. Nature can only be conceived as existing

to a universal and not to a particular end, to a universe of ends, and

not to one,--a work of _ecstasy_, to be represented by a circular

movement, as intention might be signified by a straight line of definite

length. Each effect strengthens every other. There is no revolt in all

the kingdoms from the commonweal: no detachment of an individual. Hence

the catholic character which makes every leaf an exponent of the world.

When we behold the landscape in a poetic spirit, we do not reckon

individuals. Nature knows neither palm nor oak, but only vegetable life,

which sprouts into forests, and festoons the globe with a garland of

grasses and vines.

That no single end may be selected, and nature judged thereby, appears

from this, that if man himself be considered as the end, and it be

assumed that the final cause of the world is to make holy or wise or

beautiful men, we see that it has not succeeded. Read alternately in

natural and in civil history, a treatise of astronomy, for example, with

a volume of French _Memoires pour servir_. When we have spent our wonder

in computing this wasteful hospitality with which boon nature turns off

new firmaments without end into her wide common, as fast as the

madrepores make coral,--suns and planets hospitable to souls,--and then

shorten the sight to look into this court of Louis Quatorze, and see

the game that is played there,--duke and marshal, abbé and madame,--a

gambling table where each is laying traps for the other, where the end

is ever by some lie or fetch to outwit your rival and ruin him with this

solemn fop in wig and stars,--the king; one can hardly help asking if

this planet is a fair specimen of the so generous astronomy, and if so,

whether the experiment have not failed, and whether it be quite worth

while to make more, and glut the innocent space with so poor an article.

I think we feel not much otherwise if, instead of beholding foolish

nations, we take the great and wise men, the eminent souls, and narrowly

inspect their biography. None of them seen by himself--and his

performance compared with his promise or idea, will justify the cost of

that enormous apparatus of means by which this spotted and defective

person was at last procured.

To questions of this sort, nature replies, ‘I grow.’ All is nascent,

infant. When we are dizzied with the arithmetic of the savant toiling to

compute the length of her line, the return of her curve, we are steadied

by the perception that a great deal is doing; that all seems just begun;

remote aims are in active accomplishment. We can point nowhere to

anything final; but tendency appears on all hands: planet, system,

constellation, total nature is growing like a field of maize in July; is

becoming somewhat else; is in rapid metamorphosis. The embryo does not

more strive to be man, than yonder burr of light we call a nebula tends

to be a ring, a comet, a globe, and parent of new stars. Why should not

then these messieurs of Versailles strut and plot for tabourets and

ribbons, for a season, without prejudice to their faculty to run on

better errands by and by.

But nature seems further to reply, ‘I have ventured so great a stake as

my success, in no single creature. I have not yet arrived at any end.

The gardener aims to produce a fine peach or pear, but my aim is the

health of the whole tree,--root, stem, leaf, flower, and seed,--and by

no means the pampering of a monstrous pericarp at the expense of all the

other functions.’

In short, the spirit and peculiarity of that impression nature makes on

us, is this, that it does not exist to any one or to any number of

particular ends, but to numberless and endless benefit; that there is in

it no private will, no rebel leaf or limb, but the whole is oppressed by

one superincumbent tendency, obeys that redundancy or excess of life

which in conscious beings we call _ecstasy_.

With this conception of the genius or method of nature, let us go back

to man. It is true, he pretends to give account of himself to himself,

but, at last, what has he to recite but the fact that there is a Life

not to be described or known otherwise than by possession? What account

can he give of his essence more than _so it was to be_? The _royal_

reason, the Grace of God seems the only description of our multiform but

ever identical fact. There is virtue, there is genius, there is success,

or there is not. There is the incoming or the receding of God: that is

all we can affirm; and we can show neither how nor why. Self-accusation,

remorse, and the didactic morals of self-denial and strife with sin, is

a view we are constrained by our constitution to take of the fact seen

from the platform of action; but seen from the platform of intellection,

there is nothing for us but praise and wonder.

The termination of the world in a man, appears to be the last victory of

intelligence. The universal does not attract us until housed in an

individual. Who heeds the waste abyss of possibility? The ocean is

everywhere the same, but it has no character until seen with the shore

or the ship. Who would value any number of miles of Atlantic brine

bounded by lines of latitude and longitude? Confine it by granite

rocks, let it wash a shore where wise men dwell, and it is filled with

expression; and the point of greatest interest is where the land and

water meet. So must we admire in man, the form of the formless, the

concentration of the vast, the house of reason, the cave of memory. See

the play of thoughts! what nimble gigantic creatures are these! what

saurians, what palaiotheria shall be named with these agile movers? The

great Pan of old, who was clothed in a leopard skin to signify the

beautiful variety of things and the firmament, his coat of stars,--was

but the representative of thee, O rich and various Man! thou palace of

sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night and

the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain, the geometry of the City of God;

in thy heart, the bower of love and the realms of right and wrong. An

individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form

and ripen. The history of the genesis or the old mythology repeats

itself in the experience of every child. He too is a demon or god thrown

into a particular chaos, where he strives ever to lead things from

disorder into order. Each individual soul is such, in virtue of its

being a power to translate the world into some particular language of

its own; if not into a picture, a statue, or a dance,--why, then, into a

trade, an art, a science, a mode of living, a conversation, a character,

an influence. You admire pictures, but it is as impossible for you to

paint a right picture, as for grass to bear apples. But when the genius

comes, it makes fingers: it is pliancy, and the power of transferring

the affair in the street into oils and colors. Raphael must be born, and

Salvator must be born.

There is no attractiveness like that of a new man. The sleepy nations

are occupied with their political routine. England, France and America

read Parliamentary Debates, which no high genius now enlivens; and

nobody will read them who trusts his own eye: only they who are deceived

by the popular repetition of distinguished names. But when Napoleon

unrolls his map, the eye is commanded by original power. When Chatham

leads the debate, men may well listen, because they must listen. A man,

a personal ascendency is the only great phenomenon. When nature has work

to be done, she creates a genius to do it. Follow the great man, and you

shall see what the world has at heart in these ages. There is no omen

like that.

But what strikes us in the fine genius is that which belongs of right to

every one. A man should know himself for a necessary actor. A link was

wanting between two craving parts of nature, and he was hurled into

being as the bridge over that yawning need, the mediator betwixt two

else unmarriageable facts. His two parents held each of one of the

wants, and the union of foreign constitutions in him enables him to do

gladly and gracefully what the assembled human race could not have

sufficed to do. He knows his materials; he applies himself to his work;

he cannot read, or think, or look, but he unites the hitherto separated

strands into a perfect cord. The thoughts he delights to utter are the

reason of his incarnation? Is it for him to account himself cheap and

superfluous, or to linger by the wayside for opportunities? Did he not

come into being because something must be done which he and no other is

and does? If only he _sees_, the world will be visible enough. He need

not study where to stand, nor to put things in favorable lights; in him

is the light, from him all things are illuminated to their centre. What

patron shall he ask for employment and reward? Hereto was he born, to

deliver the thought of his heart from the universe to the universe, to

do an office which nature could not forego, nor he be discharged from

rendering, and then immerge again into the holy silence and eternity

out of which as a man he arose. God is rich, and many more men than one

he harbors in his bosom, biding their time and the needs and the beauty

of all. Is not this the theory of every man’s genius or faculty? Why

then goest thou as some Boswell or listening worshipper to this saint or

to that? That is the only lese-majesty. Here art thou with whom so long

the universe travailed in labor; darest thou think meanly of thyself

whom the stalwart Fate brought forth to unite his ragged sides, to shoot

the gulf, to reconcile the irreconcilable?

Whilst a necessity so great caused the man to exist, his health and

erectness consist in the fidelity with which he transmits influences

from the vast and universal to the point on which his genius can act.

The ends are momentary: they are vents for the current of inward life

which increases as it is spent. A man’s wisdom is to know that all ends

are momentary, that the best end must be superseded by a better. But

there is a mischievous tendency in him to transfer his thought from the

life to the ends, to quit his agency and rest in his acts: the tools run

away with the workman, the human with the divine. I conceive a man as

always spoken to from behind, and unable to turn his head and see the

speaker. In all the millions who have heard the voice, none ever saw the

face. As children in their play run behind each other, and seize one by

the ears and make him walk before them, so is the spirit our unseen

pilot. That well-known voice speaks in all languages, governs all men,

and none ever caught a glimpse of its form. If the man will exactly obey

it, it will adopt him, so that he shall not any longer separate it from

himself in his thought, he shall seem to be it, he shall be it. If he

listen with insatiable ears, richer and greater wisdom is taught him,

the sound swells to a ravishing music, he is borne away as with a flood,

he becomes careless of his food and of his house, he is the fool of

ideas, and leads a heavenly life. But if his eye is set on the things to

be done, and not on the truth that is still taught, and for the sake of

which the things are to be done, then the voice grows faint, and at last

is but a humming in his ears. His health and greatness consist in his

being the channel through which heaven flows to earth, in short, in the

fulness in which an ecstatical state takes place in him. It is pitiful

to be an artist, when, by forbearing to be artists, we might be vessels

filled with the divine overflowings, enriched by the circulations of

omniscience and omnipresence. Are there not moments in the history of

heaven when the human race was not counted by individuals, but was only

the Influenced, was God in distribution, God rushing into multiform

benefit? It is sublime to receive, sublime to love, but this lust of

imparting as from _us_, this desire to be loved, the wish to be

recognized as individuals,--is finite, comes of a lower strain.

Shall I say, then, that, as far as we can trace the natural history of

the soul, its health consists in the fulness of its reception,--call it

piety, call it veneration--in the fact, that enthusiasm is organized

therein. What is best in any work of art, but that part which the work

itself seems to require and do; that which the man cannot do again, that

which flows from the hour and the occasion, like the eloquence of men in

a tumultuous debate? It was always the theory of literature, that the

word of a poet was authoritative and final. He was supposed to be the

mouth of a divine wisdom. We rather envied his circumstance than his

talent. We too could have gladly prophesied standing in that place. We

so quote our Scriptures; and the Greeks so quoted Homer, Theognis,

Pindar, and the rest. If the theory has receded out of modern criticism,

it is because we have not had poets. Whenever they appear, they will

redeem their own credit.

This ecstatical state seems to direct a regard to the whole and not to

the parts; to the cause and not to the ends; to the tendency, and not to

the act. It respects genius and not talent; hope, and not possession:

the anticipation of all things by the intellect, and not the history

itself; art, and not works of art; poetry, and not experiment; virtue,

and not duties.

There is no office or function of man but is rightly discharged by this

divine method, and nothing that is not noxious to him if detached from

its universal relations. Is it his work in the world to study nature, or

the laws of the world? Let him beware of proposing to himself any end.

Is it for use? nature is debased, as if one looking at the ocean can

remember only the price of fish. Or is it for pleasure? he is mocked:

there is a certain infatuating air in woods and mountains which draws on

the idler to want and misery. There is something social and intrusive in

the nature of all things; they seek to penetrate and overpower, each the

nature of every other creature, and itself alone in all modes and

throughout space and spirit to prevail and possess. Every star in heaven

is discontented and insatiable. Gravitation and chemistry cannot content

them. Ever they woo and court the eye of every beholder. Every man who

comes into the world they seek to fascinate and possess, to pass into

his mind, for they desire to republish themselves in a more delicate

world than that they occupy. It is not enough that they are Jove, Mars,

Orion, and the North Star, in the gravitating firmament: they would have

such poets as Newton, Herschel and Laplace, that they may re-exist and

re-appear in the finer world of rational souls, and fill that realm with

their fame. So is it with all immaterial objects. These beautiful

basilisks set their brute, glorious eyes on the eye of every child, and,

if they can, cause their nature to pass through his wondering eyes into

him, and so all things are mixed.

Therefore man must be on his guard against this cup of enchantments, and

must look at nature with a supernatural eye. By piety alone, by

conversing with the cause of nature, is he safe and commands it. And

because all knowledge is assimilation to the object of knowledge, as the

power or genius of nature is ecstatic, so must its science or the

description of it be. The poet must be a rhapsodist: his inspiration a

sort of bright casualty: his will in it only the surrender of will to

the Universal Power, which will not be seen face to face, but must be

received and sympathetically known. It is remarkable that we have out of

the deeps of antiquity in the oracles ascribed to the half fabulous

Zoroaster, a statement of this fact, which every lover and seeker of

truth will recognize. “It is not proper,” said Zoroaster, “to understand

the Intelligible with vehemence, but if you incline your mind, you will

apprehend it: not too earnestly, but bringing a pure and inquiring eye.

You will not understand it as when understanding some particular thing,

but with the flower of the mind. Things divine are not attainable by

mortals who understand sensual things, but only the light-armed arrive

at the summit.”

And because ecstasy is the law and cause of nature, therefore you cannot

interpret it in too high and deep a sense. Nature represents the best

meaning of the wisest man. Does the sunset landscape seem to you the

place of Friendship,--those purple skies and lovely waters the

amphitheatre dressed and garnished only for the exchange of thought and

love of the purest souls? It is that. All other meanings which base men

have put on it are conjectural and false. You cannot bathe twice in the

same river, said Heraclitus; and I add, a man never sees the same object

twice: with his own enlargement the object acquires new aspects.

Does not the same law hold for virtue? It is vitiated by too much will.

He who aims at progress, should aim at an infinite, not at a special

benefit. The reforms whose fame now fills the land with Temperance,

Anti-Slavery, Non-Resistance, No Government, Equal Labor, fair and

generous as each appears, are poor bitter things when prosecuted for

themselves as an end. To every reform, in proportion to its energy,

early disgusts are incident, so that the disciple is surprised at the

very hour of his first triumphs, with chagrins, and sickness, and a

general distrust: so that he shuns his associates, hates the enterprise

which lately seemed so fair, and meditates to cast himself into the arms

of that society and manner of life which he had newly abandoned with so

much pride and hope. Is it that he attached the value of virtue to some

particular practices, as, the denial of certain appetites in certain

specified indulgences, and, afterward, found himself still as wicked and

as far from happiness in that abstinence, as he had been in the abuse?

But the soul can be appeased not by a deed but by a tendency. It is in a

hope that she feels her wings. You shall love rectitude and not the

disuse of money or the avoidance of trade: an unimpeded mind, and not a

monkish diet; sympathy and usefulness, and not hoeing or coopering. Tell

me not how great your project is, the civil liberation of the world,

its conversion into a Christian church, the establishment of public

education, cleaner diet, a new division of labor and of land, laws of

love for laws of property;--I say to you plainly there is no end to

which your practical faculty can aim, so sacred or so large, that, if

pursued for itself, will not at last become carrion and an offence to

the nostril. The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with

objects immense and eternal. Your end should be one inapprehensible to

the senses; then will it be a god always approached,--never touched;

always giving health. A man adorns himself with prayer and love, as an

aim adorns an action. What is strong but goodness, and what is energetic

but the presence of a brave man? The doctrine in vegetable physiology of

the _presence_, or the general influence of any substance over and above

its chemical influence, as of an alkali or a living plant, is more

predicable of man. You need not speak to me, I need not go where you

are, that you should exert magnetism on me. Be you only whole and

sufficient, and I shall feel you in every part of my life and fortune,

and I can as easily dodge the gravitation of the globe as escape your

influence.

But there are other examples of this total and supreme influence,

besides Nature and the conscience. “From the poisonous tree, the

world,” say the Brahmins, “two species of fruit are produced, sweet as

the waters of life, Love or the society of beautiful souls, and Poetry,

whose taste is like the immortal juice of Vishnu.” What is Love, and why

is it the chief good, but because it is an overpowering enthusiasm?

Never self-possessed or prudent, it is all abandonment. Is it not a

certain admirable wisdom, preferable to all other advantages, and

whereof all others are only secondaries and indemnities, because this is

that in which the individual is no longer his own foolish master, but

inhales an odorous and celestial air, is wrapped round with awe of the

object, blending for the time that object with the real and only good,

and consults every omen in nature with tremulous interest. When we speak

truly,--is not he only unhappy who is not in love? his fancied freedom

and self-rule--is it not so much death? He who is in love is wise and is

becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved,

drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it

possesses. Therefore if the object be not itself a living and expanding

soul, he presently exhausts it. But the love remains in his mind, and

the wisdom it brought him; and it craves a new and higher object. And

the reason why all men honor love, is because it looks up and not down;

aspires and not despairs.

And what is Genius but finer love, a love impersonal, a love of the

flower and perfection of things, and a desire to draw a new picture or

copy of the same? It looks to the cause and life: it proceeds from

within outward, whilst Talent goes from without inward. Talent finds its

models, methods, and ends, in society, exists for exhibition, and goes

to the soul only for power to work. Genius is its own end, and draws its

means and the style of its architecture from within, going abroad only

for audience, and spectator, as we adapt our voice and phrase to the

distance and character of the ear we speak to. All your learning of all

literatures would never enable you to anticipate one of its thoughts or

expressions, and yet each is natural and familiar as household words.

Here about us coils forever the ancient enigma, so old and so

unutterable. Behold! there is the sun, and the rain, and the rocks: the

old sun, the old stones. How easy were it to describe all this fitly;

yet no word can pass. Nature is a mute, and man, her articulate speaking

brother, lo! he also is a mute. Yet when Genius arrives, its speech is

like a river; it has no straining to describe, more than there is

straining in nature to exist. When thought is best, there is most of

it. Genius sheds wisdom like perfume, and advertises us that it flows

out of a deeper source than the foregoing silence, that it knows so

deeply and speaks so musically, because it is itself a mutation of the

thing it describes. It is sun and moon and wave and fire in music, as

astronomy is thought and harmony in masses of matter.

What is all history but the work of ideas, a record of the incomputable

energy which his infinite aspirations infuse into man? Has any thing

grand and lasting been done? Who did it? Plainly not any man, but all

men: it was the prevalence and inundation of an idea. What brought the

pilgrims here? One man says, civil liberty; another, the desire of

founding a church; and a third, discovers that the motive force was

plantation and trade. But if the Puritans could rise from the dust, they

could not answer. It is to be seen in what they were, and not in what

they designed; it was the growth and expansion of the human race, and

resembled herein the sequent Revolution, which was not begun in Concord,

or Lexington, or Virginia, but was the overflowing of the sense of

natural right in every clear and active spirit of the period. Is a man

boastful and knowing, and his own master?--we turn from him without

hope: but let him be filled with awe and dread before the Vast and the

Divine, which uses him glad to be used, and our eye is riveted to the

chain of events. What a debt is ours to that old religion which, in the

childhood of most of us, still dwelt like a sabbath morning in the

country of New England, teaching privation, self-denial and sorrow! A

man was born not for prosperity, but to suffer for the benefit of

others, like the noble rock-maple which all around our villages bleeds

for the service of man. Not praise, not men’s acceptance of our doing,

but the spirit’s holy errand through us absorbed the thought. How

dignified was this! How all that is called talents and success, in our

noisy capitals, becomes buzz and din before this man-worthiness! How our

friendships and the complaisances we use, shame us now! Shall we not

quit our companions, as if they were thieves and pot-companions, and

betake ourselves to some desert cliff of mount Katahdin, some unvisited

recess in Moosehead Lake, to bewail our innocency and to recover it, and

with it the power to communicate again with these sharers of a more

sacred idea?

And what is to replace for us the piety of that race? We cannot have

theirs: it glides away from us day by day, but we also can bask in the

great morning which rises forever out of the eastern sea, and be

ourselves the children of the light. I stand here to say, Let us worship

the mighty and transcendent Soul. It is the office, I doubt not, of this

age to annul that adulterous divorce which the superstition of many ages

has effected between the intellect and holiness. The lovers of goodness

have been one class, the students of wisdom another, as if either could

exist in any purity without the other. Truth is always holy, holiness

always wise. I will that we keep terms with sin, and a sinful literature

and society, no longer, but live a life of discovery and performance.

Accept the intellect, and it will accept us. Be the lowly ministers of

that pure omniscience, and deny it not before men. It will burn up all

profane literature, all base current opinions, all the false powers of

the world, as in a moment of time. I draw from nature the lesson of an

intimate divinity. Our health and reason as men needs our respect to

this fact, against the heedlessness and against the contradiction of

society. The sanity of man needs the poise of this immanent force. His

nobility needs the assurance of this inexhaustible reserved power. How

great soever have been its bounties, they are a drop to the sea whence

they flow. If you say, ‘the acceptance of the vision is also the act of

God:’--I shall not seek to penetrate the mystery, I admit the force of

what you say. If you ask, ‘How can any rules be given for the attainment

of gifts so sublime?’ I shall only remark that the solicitations of this

spirit, as long as there is life, are never forborne. Tenderly,

tenderly, they woo and court us from every object in nature, from every

fact in life, from every thought in the mind. The one condition coupled

with the gift of truth is its use. That man shall be learned who

reduceth his learning to practice. Emanuel Swedenborg affirmed that it

was opened to him, “that the spirits who knew truth in this life, but

did it not, at death shall lose their knowledge.” “If knowledge,” said

Ali the Caliph, “calleth unto practice, well; if not, it goeth away.”

The only way into nature is to enact our best insight. Instantly we are

higher poets, and can speak a deeper law. Do what you know, and

perception is converted into character, as islands and continents were

built by invisible infusories, or, as these forest leaves absorb light,

electricity, and volatile gases, and the gnarled oak to live a thousand

years is the arrest and fixation of the most volatile and ethereal

currents. The doctrine of this Supreme Presence is a cry of joy and

exultation. Who shall dare think he has come late into nature, or has

missed anything excellent in the past, who seeth the admirable stars of

possibility, and the yet untouched continent of hope glittering with all

its mountains in the vast West? I praise with wonder this great reality,

which seems to drown all things in the deluge of its light. What man

seeing this, can lose it from his thoughts, or entertain a meaner

subject? The entrance of this into his mind seems to be the birth of

man. We cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but we know

that it is divine. I cannot tell if these wonderful qualities which

house to-day in this mortal frame, shall ever re-assemble in equal

activity in a similar frame, or whether they have before had a natural

history like that of this body you see before you; but this one thing I

know, that these qualities did not now begin to exist, cannot be sick

with my sickness, nor buried in any grave; but that they circulate

through the Universe: before the world was, they were. Nothing can bar

them out, or shut them in, but they penetrate the ocean and land, space

and time, form and essence, and hold the key to universal nature. I draw

from this faith courage and hope. All things are known to the soul. It

is not to be surprised by any communication. Nothing can be greater than

it. Let those fear and those fawn who will. The soul is in her native

realm, and it is wider than space, older than time, wide as hope, rich

as love. Pusillanimity and fear she refuses with a beautiful scorn; they

are not for her who putteth on her coronation robes, and goes out

through universal love to universal power.

MAN THE REFORMER.

A LECTURE READ BEFORE THE MECHANICS’ APPRENTICES’ LIBRARY ASSOCIATION,

BOSTON, JANUARY 25, 1841.

MAN THE REFORMER.

MR. PRESIDENT, AND GENTLEMEN,

I wish to offer to your consideration some thoughts on the particular

and general relations of man as a reformer. I shall assume that the aim

of each young man in this association is the very highest that belongs

to a rational mind. Let it be granted, that our life, as we lead it, is

common and mean; that some of those offices and functions for which we

were mainly created are grown so rare in society, that the memory of

them is only kept alive in old books and in dim traditions; that

prophets and poets, that beautiful and perfect men, we are not now, no,

nor have even seen such; that some sources of human instruction are

almost unnamed and unknown among us; that the community in which we live

will hardly bear to be told that every man should be open to ecstasy or

a divine illumination, and his daily walk elevated by intercourse with

the spiritual world. Grant all this, as we must, yet I suppose none of

my auditors will deny that we ought to seek to establish ourselves in

such disciplines and courses as will deserve that guidance and clearer

communication with the spiritual nature. And further, I will not

dissemble my hope, that each person whom I address has felt his own call

to cast aside all evil customs, timidities, and limitations, and to be

in his place a free and helpful man, a reformer, a benefactor, not

content to slip along through the world like a footman or a spy,

escaping by his nimbleness and apologies as many knocks as he can, but a

brave and upright man, who must find or cut a straight road to

everything excellent in the earth, and not only go honorably himself,

but make it easier for all who follow him, to go in honor and with

benefit.

In the history of the world the doctrine of Reform had never such scope

as at the present hour. Lutherans, Hernhutters, Jesuits, Monks, Quakers,

Knox, Wesley, Swedenborg, Bentham, in their accusations of society, all

respected something,--church or state, literature or history, domestic

usages, the market town, the dinner table, coined money. But now all

these and all things else hear the trumpet, and must rush to

judgment,--Christianity, the laws, commerce, schools, the farm, the

laboratory; and not a kingdom, town, statute, rite, calling, man, or

woman, but is threatened by the new spirit.

What if some of the objections whereby our institutions are assailed are

extreme and speculative, and the reformers tend to idealism; that only

shows the extravagance of the abuses which have driven the mind into the

opposite extreme. It is when your facts and persons grow unreal and

fantastic by too much falsehood, that the scholar flies for refuge to

the world of ideas, and aims to recruit and replenish nature from that

source. Let ideas establish their legitimate sway again in society, let

life be fair and poetic, and the scholars will gladly be lovers,

citizens, and philanthropists.

It will afford no security from the new ideas, that the old nations, the

laws of centuries, the property and institutions of a hundred cities,

are built on other foundations. The demon of reform has a secret door

into the heart of every lawmaker, of every inhabitant of every city. The

fact, that a new thought and hope have dawned in your breasts, should

apprize you that in the same hour a new light broke in upon a thousand

private hearts. That secret which you would fain keep,--as soon as you

go abroad, lo! there is one standing on the doorstep, to tell you the

same. There is not the most bronzed and sharpened money-catcher, who

does not, to your consternation, almost, quail and shake the moment he

hears a question prompted by the new ideas. We thought he had some

semblance of ground to stand upon, that such as he at least would die

hard; but he trembles and flees. Then the scholar says, ‘Cities and

coaches shall never impose on me again; for, behold every solitary dream

of mine is rushing to fulfilment. That fancy I had, and hesitated to

utter because you would laugh,--the broker, the attorney, the market-man

are saying the same thing. Had I waited a day longer to speak, I had

been too late. Behold, State Street thinks, and Wall Street doubts, and

begins to prophecy!’